Official Google Blog: Adieu to Google Answers

I see Google is no longer accepting questions on the Google Answers site. That’s fine with me. Hopefully this frees up a few developers they can shift over to work on Google Reader – again today all I get are errors:

I don’t understand why they haven’t fixed this yet. It is extremely annoying because nothing I read gets marked read. Well, that’s not quite true – it gets marked as read, but then comes back as unread the next time I refresh.

Comments

Try NetVibes instead of Google Reader. As for Google Answers, I think they simply conceded to Yahoo. The timing of their shutdown is interesting since Yahoo is now integrating their own answers product in their search results. Is Yahoo moving from a static search platform to a social search platform? If so, and they start to integrate more of their social media sites with search (like del.icio.us), they might build a better search experience than Google.

In response to Google’s announcement that they are shutting down the Google Answers service, researchers have banded together to petition Google to keep GA alive. Perhaps you could run a story on this?

The Google Answers service has helped many people during its four and a half years of existence, and it continues to do so. Researchers and unpaid commenters formed a community which should not be discarded lightly. Many repeat users were able to easily find answers to difficult questions thanks to the service. Furthermore, Google Answers proved that a living could be made working on the Internet alone, as many researchers worked on the site as their sole source of income.

We, the undersigned, believe that Google should continue to provide this valuable community service to the Internet.